Oleksandr Sienin: Ukraine War Stories – Developing a Game about the War around Us

Oleksandr Sienin is a Lead Game Designer at Starni Games, a Ukraine-based indie studio known for its hardcore wargame series Strategic Mind, led by its founder Ihor Tymoshenko. Having a number of released PC titles and growing from 3 to 30 people over the course of the last few years, the Starni Games team is set to deliver new great titles. Yet, when the war in Ukraine started in 2022, the team decided to develop Ukraine War Stories – a fully free charity project that focuses on what the civilian people of Ukraine experienced during the first month of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, to provide a much more immersive experience than a regular newspaper article. Ukraine War Stories is a unique project in many respects, as allows us to try and understand what it feels like to find yourself in the middle of the largest 21st-century war overnight. With the Starni Games office based in Kyiv, many of the events in Ukraine War Stories happened literally a few dozen kilometers from it.

Oleksandr’s talk is about developing a morally difficult yet necessary project with very limited time and resources in the middle of a war. It explains what difficulties the team faced, how the audience perceived the project, and how important it is to communicate the project idea in the right way.